Six years ago, Dr. Neil Patel decided to look beyond his home state of California and apply his Stanford University Ph.D. researchto pressing problems in international development. He arrived in India, and found that communications platforms driven by basic phones and medium of voice could overcome basic barriers of literacy and language to both disseminate content and collect data. His thesis on a prototype for such a system for small farmers in Gujarat soon became one of the most referenced in the ICT4D space. His advisor, Dr. Tapan Parikh at UC, Berkeley, suggested he start a company to scale the clear impact this system could have on the way rural communications worked in the development sector. Awaaz.De was born in Ahmedabad.
